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Aboard the HMS Beagle

We should have heeded the blood

Charles Darwin stared down at the words he had scrawled in black ink on the white pages of his journal, but all he saas crilow of his sainst a cold that iced the idity that he suspected would never fullyhow his father had urged hiy after he had dropped out of medical school

Perhaps I should have listened

Instead, he had been lured astray by the appeal of foreign shores and new scientific discoveries A year ago, almost to the day, he had accepted a position aboard the HMS Beagle as the ship’s naturalist At the tender age of twenty-two, he had been ready to make a name for himself, to see the world It was how he had ended up here noith blood on his hands

He stared around his cabin Upon first coiven private quarters in the ship’s chart rooe table in the h by the trunk of thefree inch—cabinets, bookshelves, even the washbasin—as work space and a temporary museum for his collected specimens and samples He had bones and fossils, teeth and shells, even stuffed or preserved specimens of unusual snakes, lizards, and birds Near his elbow rested a board of pinned beetles of monstrous sizes with prominent horns like those of the African rhinoceros Next to his inkwell stood a row of jars holding dried plants and seeds

He stared forlornly across his collection—what the uniinative Captain FitzRoy called useless junk

Perhaps I should have arranged to have this lot shipped back to England before the Beagle left Tierra del Fuego

But regretfully, like the rest of the ship’s crew, he had been too caught up in stories told by the savages of that archipelago: the native Fuegians of the Yaghan tribe The tribesods, and wonders beyond ile astray, sending the ship and its crew south from the tip of South America, across the ice-choked seas to this frozen world at the bottom of the earth

“Terra Australis Incognita,” he mumbled to himself

The infamous Unknown Southern Land

He shifted a o, shortly after arriving at Tierra del Fuego, Captain FitzRoy had shown hi back to 1583

It depicted that unexplored continent at the southern pole of the globe The chart was plainly inaccurate, failing even to account for the fact that the cartographer’s contemporary, Sir Francis Drake, had already discovered the icy seas that separated South America fro since this map was first drawn, this inhospitable continent continued to be a mystery Even its coastline remained shadowy and unmapped

So was it any wonder that all of their iians, a bony-liift to the newly arrived crew of the Beagle? The ship had been anchored near Woolya Cove, where the good Reverend Richard Matthews had established atheh the elder who presented the gift didn’t speak the king’s tongue, what he offered needed no words